How digital marketing helps your business grow

All business owners have heard someone, somewhere, talking about how digital marketing is the one and only way to drive business growth in the new digital society. While it takes more than just one element to ensure that a business thrives, they aren’t too far off by implying the vital importance of online marketing activities. This blog post takes a more in-depth look at four reasons why digital marketing is better than traditional marketing – and how these benefits aid the growth of a business:

Benefits of Digital Marketing

1. Increased geographical impact

Small business marketing of the past was very restricted in terms of spread. Classified adverts are only read by the people who buy the newspaper, and flyers are only read – if at all – by the individuals who have received one. Digital marketing, on the other hand, has given small businesses access to vast networks of potential customers, with the rise of social media and search engine marketing. Online, marketing messages can be posted, shared and linked to thousands of times, and a single message created in South Africa can spread across the planet.

 2. Reduced marketing budgets

Here’s a horror story for you: television advertising. Television and other traditional mediums of promotion have always cost an arm and a leg. This exclusivity led to the vast majority of SMEs being unable to compete with the larger companies – merely because they didn’t have the same advertising budgets. Digital marketing has levelled the playing field somewhat where small brands can access the same channels as their largest competitors, and advertise to the same audiences at costs that are minute compared to traditional advertising fees.

3. Measurable business growth

In a recent article about the trends to keep in mind when starting digital marketing, we spoke about how traditional marketing has always been difficult to track precisely. Newspapers can tell you what their readership is, but this does not mean that every single person they include actually reads every issue. On the other hand, digital marketing allows for data collection at every step. You can see how many people have seen your marketing content, how many have clicked through, how many have engaged with you, etc.

4. Improved audience targeting

Hands down the most significant advantage that digital marketing offers a growing business is a hyper-targeting potential. In the past, marketers would cast wide nets with very generic promotional material, hoping to catch a bunch of leads. Today, it’s all about targeting the individual on a personal level. We don’t focus our targeting on age, gender, or income bracket anymore. Nowadays, platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Advertising allow you to set specific target market traits, like their interests online, the social media pages they follow, their careers, their education history, and other characteristics.

Digital marketing might seem light rocket science at first, with so many acronyms and technical terms. However, it’s easy once you get into it – and extremely rewarding when you see your blog articles being published or social media designs being engaged with.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

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